These are the archives from my journalspace blog, which no longer exists because journalspace lost everything in December 2008 BUT I AM NOT BITTER.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

So hard to get good help

posted Thu, 02 Nov 2006

SH and I watched the movie “Friends with Money” last night. The premise is that Jennifer Aniston is a maid and all her friends are rich. Sure. Whatever. And she is living in LA on the what -- $500 a week? -- she is making as a maid?

What I want to know is how anyone finds a maid – in Los Angeles – an Anglo, non-illegal immigrant maid – who will clean houses the way Aniston’s character does. When I had a white cleaning lady in Memphis, she never did the things Aniston does: pulls the hair out of the bathtub drain, cleans the inside of the refrigerator (OK, Kathy would have done that – I left her a note asking her to do it once – but she told me she would charge extra), and does laundry.

Of course, neither of my cleaning ladies, as far as I know, ever brought a man into my house, dressed up in a French maid costume and had sex in my bed with a loser boyfriend who then demanded part of the cleaning fee because he “helped” by pointing out that the maid had “missed a spot.” Or stole a $75 face cream from me. I don’t even have $75 face cream.Source: http://www.1976design.com/blog/images/302a.jpg

When I hired Esperanza, who may or may not have been legal (her Uruguayan husband worked at Federal Express, but that didn’t mean Esperanza had permission to work in the US), she would do laundry and windows, which was much more than Kathy ever did, but not once did she dig her fingers into that bathtub drain and not once did she wipe the shelves inside the fridge.

Aniston’s character does all this stuff in houses three times the size of mine for only $100. I paid Esperanza $65. Hollywood really is out of touch with reality.